THE WEBDAM BLOG

The Changing Face of Tech

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Viewed from the outside in, Silicon Valley lives up to its rep as mostly white and mostly male. Recent analysis of some of tech’s largest companies estimates that the workforce is about 60% white and 70% male.

But those of us in Silicon Valley can see the tide starting to turn. A growing number of techies – everyone from engineers and marketers to entrepreneurs and investors – represent women, people of color, LGBT and other diverse backgrounds.

Are there enough of them? No. But this group is blazing a trail and showing the hiring minds in Silicon Valley that more than one kind of person can do the job.

Photographer Helena Price recently published a project that shines a spotlight on 100 members of this rising coalition. It’s called Techies, and it combines striking portraits with personal interviews about who the subjects are, where they come from, how they got to Silicon Valley and whether or not they plan to stay.

WebDAM CEO and Founder Jody Vandergriff is one of the subjects, and her interview is full of tidbits you won’t find in her other interviews. From her programming origin story to navigating her way around the fundraising boys club to merging parenting and start-up leadership, the interview is a revealing look into the world of a female CEO in the Valley.

The project is making waves – it’s featured by ABC News, CNN, The Guardian, Fast Company, Fortune, TechCrunch and many more.

Stories like these make it easy to believe that the future of tech may lie in the relatively untapped ideas and perspectives of underrepresented people like those featured in Techies.